Навчальний посібник для студентів ос «Бакалавр» галузі знань 03 «Гуманітарні науки»

name the following year (1948) after Robert Kemp, a Scottish playwright and 
journalist, wrote during the second Edinburgh International Festival: ‘Round 
the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise 
than before ... I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the 
evenings!’
The Fringe did not benefit from any official organization until 1951, 
when students of the University of Edinburgh set up a drop-in centre in the 
YMCA, where cheap food and a bed for the night were made available to 
participating groups. It was 1955 before the first attempt was made to provide 
a central booking service.
Formal organization progressed in 1959, with the formation of the 
Festival Fringe Society. A constitution was drawn up, in which the policy of 
not vetting or censoring shows was set out, and the Society produced the first 
guide to Fringe shows. Nineteen companies participated in the Fringe in that 
year. 
The artistic credentials of the Fringe were established by the creators of 
the Traverse Theatre, John Calder, Jim Haynes and Richard Demarco in 1963. 
While their original objective was to maintain something of the Festival 
atmosphere in Edinburgh all year round, the Traverse Theatre quickly and 
regularly presented cutting edge drama to an international audience on both 
the Edinburgh International Festival and on the Fringe during August. It set a 
standard to which other companies on the Fringe aspired. The Traverse is 
occasionally referred to as 'The Fringe venue that got away', reflecting its 
current status as a permanent and integral part of the Edinburgh arts scene. 
Problems began to arise as the Fringe became too big for students and 
volunteers to deal with. Eventually in 1969 the Society became a constituted 
body, and in 1970 it employed its first administrator, John Milligan, who left 
in 1976.

217 
Between 1976 and 1981, under the direction of Alistair Moffat, the 
number of companies performing rose from 182 to 494, thus achieving its 
position of the largest arts festival in the world. At this point, the Fringe 
operated on only two full-time members of staff. In 1988 the Society moved 
from 170 High Street to its current expanded headquarters on the Royal 
Mile.Eclecticism ruled the 1990s with acts like The Jim Rose 
Circus and Tokyo Shock Boys. 
Statistics for 2011 Edinburgh Festival Fringe concluded that it was the 
largest on record: there were over 40,000 performances of over 2,500 
different shows in 258 venues.
Ticket sales amounted to around 1.8 million.
There are now 12 full-time members of staff. 
Of the shows, theatre had been the largest genre in terms of number of 
shows until 2008, when it was overtaken by comedy, which has been the 
major growth area over the last 20 years. The other genres are, in order of 
number of shows: Music, Dance & Physical Theatre, Musicals & Opera, and 
Children's Shows, in addition to assorted Events and Exhibitions. 
It is possible to sample shows before committing to a full performance. 
For many years, the Fringe Club (variously in the High Street from 1971 and 
at Teviot Row Student Union from 1981) provided nightly showcases of 
Fringe fare to allow audiences to sample shows. The Fringe Club closed down 
in 2004, and various venues still provide "the Best of the Fest" and similar. 
The best opportunity used to be afforded by "Fringe Sunday", started in the 
High Street in 1981 and moved through pressure of popularity to Holyrood 
Park in 1983. Fringe Sunday was held on the second Sunday of the Fringe 
when companies performed for free. Having outgrown even Holyrood Park, 
this showcase took place on The Meadows until 2008. Alternatively, on any 
day during the Fringe the pedestrianised area of the High Street around St 
Giles' Cathedral and the Fringe Office becomes the focal point for theatre 

companies to hand out flyers, perform scenes from their shows, and attempt to 
sell tickets. Many shows are "2 for 1" on the opening weekend of the Festival. 
According to the Fringe Society there were 258 venues in 2011, 
although over 80 of them housed events or exhibitions, which are not part of 
the main performing art genres that the Fringe is generally known for. 
Over the first 20 years each performing group had its own performing 
space, or venue. However, by around 1970 the concept of sharing a venue 
became popular, principally as a means of cutting costs. It soon became 
possible to host up to 6 or 7 different shows per day in a hall. The obvious 
next step was to partition a venue into two or more performing spaces; the 
majority of today's venues fit into this category. This approach was taken a 
stage further by the early 1980s with the arrival of the "super-venue" – a 
location that contains multiple performing spaces. The Assembly 
Rooms started the trend in 1981, taking over the empty Georgian building that 
had once hosted the International Festival Club, and the following year The 
Circuit was prominent; it was in fact a "tented village”, that was situated on a 
piece of empty ground, popularly known as "The Hole in The Ground", once 
the site of a church building (Poole's Synod Hall) converted to a cinema, 
where the Saltire complex was subsequently built in the early 1990s. The 
new Traverse Theatre opened here in 1993. 
Venues now come in all shapes and sizes, with use being made of every 
conceivable space from proper theatres (e.g. Traverse or Bedlam Theatre), 
custom-made theatres (e.g. Music Hall in the Assembly Rooms), historic 
castles (C venues), to lecture theatres (theSpaceUK, Pleasance, George 
Square Theatre and Sweet ECA), conference centres, other university rooms 
and 
spaces, 
temporary 
structures 
(The 
Famous 
Spiegeltent and 
the Udderbelly ), churches and church halls (Paradise in Augustines
), 
schools, a public toilet, the back of a taxi, and even in the audience's own 
homes. 

219 
The groups that operate the venues are also very diverse: some are 
commercial and others not-for-profit; some operate year-round, while others 
exist only to run venues at the Fringe. Many are based in London. 
From the performers' perspective, the decision on where to perform is 
typically based on a mixture of cost, location (close proximity to other venues 
is seen as a plus), and the philosophy of the venue – some of whom specialise 
in amateur, school or college productions, some of whom are semi or wholly 
professional. 
The professionalism of venues and of organisations has greatly 
increased. The church hall at Lauriston Place, used by Edinburgh University 
Theatre Company as Bedlam Theatre, was taken over by Richard Crane and 
Faynia Williams from the University of Bradford in 1975 to house "Satan's 
Ball". This was an ambitious benchmark production which inspired others.
By 
1980 when William Burdett-Coutts set up the Assembly Theatre in the 
Assembly Rooms on George Street (formerly the EIF Festival Club), the 
investment in staging, lighting and sound meant that the original amateur or 
student theatricals were left behind. There was still theatre done on a 
shoestring, but several cultural entrepreneurs had raised the stakes to the point 
where a venue like Aurora (St Stephen's Church,Stockbridge) could hold its 
head up in any major world festival. In 2009, the Space UK launched
their 
multi-space complex at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 2011, a new all-
year-round multi-arts festival venue, containing ten performance spaces, 
opened in the former Royal Dick Veterinary School under the name 
Summerhall . 

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